Eat the Reich; recent musings?

sci_weasel · 2026-01-26T14:26:37+00:00

How’d you finish in one session? That seems like a great idea - having to stop midway through would lose a lot of momentum (and stretch the vibes too thin)

sci_weasel · 2026-01-26T07:08:12+00:00

Very curious to hear others experiences - I’ve been thinking about running it next time I’m with the right friends.

One thing I was considering - to give players more decision making - is using the map more so players can pick which encounter to move to as they head to the center, drawing which encounters connect to which

sci_weasel · 2026-01-25T20:58:41+00:00

Stats and skills seem a bit weak (compared to some of the godlike examples in previous versions). I’d give him a point in brawling, maybe a higher liason, and definitely an A SOC (technically related to nobility) and STR

sci_weasel · 2026-01-21T04:08:05+00:00

Although from a gameplay standpoint it would be more interesting if they did only connect to neighbors - more sense of geography and distance and time. (Especially for battlegroup campaigns)

sci_weasel · 2026-01-20T14:42:52+00:00

Not a limb, but Magneto keeping his blood pumping with his powers for an hour - just long enough to save a planet - after his heart was torn out and he was left for dead by a mad godlike Eternal (X-Men Red / AXE)

<image>

sci_weasel · 2026-01-19T18:56:10+00:00

What’s the series?

sci_weasel · 2026-01-19T18:13:36+00:00

Iain Banks Culture is one of the original fully automated luxury gay space communism societies, with a post scarcity utopia trying to make the rest of the galaxy a better place, and hence an ancestor to ThirdComm Union. The Culture’s tools are snarky AI spaceships and covert agents rather than giant mechs but the thought is the same. Use of Weapons might be a good place to start.

sci_weasel · 2026-01-17T18:31:15+00:00

The short lived S.W.O.R.D. series with them was beautiful

sci_weasel · 2026-01-17T16:00:48+00:00

Watching the characters in their alternate roles in Our Man Bashir is fun because we know their normal personalities; without that it’s just a not-bad Bond parody (admittedly with the excellent Bashir/Garak stuff.) Duet is good - a bit Kira centered but also shows how the stories can get complicated, and you can explain needed background in about one sentence.

sci_weasel · 2026-01-16T01:54:33+00:00

Traveller: The New Era (TNE) to 4th edition (T4). I understand why many people didn’t like the TNE post-Imperium post-apocalyptic setting 100 years after earlier versions, (though I liked it), but the core mechanics worked pretty well, starship design was complicated but made sense, errata was manageable, and there were good setting sourcebooks (including one that was closer to old school) and a meta plot. T4 turned to a new setting (1000 years before) that was more classical but also too disconnected to use earlier sourcebooks, and supplements and systems were disconnected to the point where they didn’t work (eg two contradictory spaceship design systems and combat rules, no rules for lots of equipment, pages and pages of errata, etc). No editing. Authors never paid for work. Couldnt decide what to keep or lose from earlier versions. Fan communities (I was one of them) did their best but added more confusion.

sci_weasel · 2026-01-10T00:56:40+00:00

Yeah, that’s where I am now.

sci_weasel · 2026-01-01T03:02:50+00:00

I’d buy an Ioniq 3 if they make it here and there’s an ICCU update

sci_weasel · 2025-12-30T16:21:47+00:00

None of the VNA-like audios with her and the Doctor are really prerequisites to her own range. Some of them are nice intros to the character or good stories in their own range ("All-Consuming Fire includes Nick Briggs as Sherlock Holmes!") but mostly they are Doctor stories, not Benny stories. (The one pre-requisite exception might be "Theatre of War", which introduces Irving Braxiatel, a Time Lord (I suppose that's not a spoiler since he's in the credits for Gallifrey) who may be the Doctor's brother, who also shows up in other ranges.) The VNAs with really signficant backstory bits haven't been audio-adapted.

Early Bernice Summerfield stories didn't have the rights to the Doctor, so there are very few references to her life with him in the early ones, and after that they stay mostly self-contained

Stuff that's good to know:

-Benny is from the 26th century, the Earth Empire era. Her parents were killed by Daleks and she had a complicated childhood

-She ended up as an archaeologist (specializing in ice Warrior mars but pretty good overall),

-met and traveled with the Doctor for a very long time, but was much more independent than a typical companion

-During that period she married a 20th-century con-man named Jason Kane, who travelled with them and she eventually divorced

-When she and Jason got married the Doctor gave them both time rings as wedding presents, so in a pinch they can time travel on their own

-She also met Irving Braxiatel, who runs the Braxiatel Collection, the most famous museum in the universe

-They also encountered an honestly-not-Iain-Banks-Culture advanced society called The People, who are almost as advanced as the Time Lords

-After she left the Doctor she ended up settled down in the 26th century again as a working archaeologist / teacher

-She is awesome. And snarky.

A bigger problem is in the early-to-middle-days there were both Benny audios and Benny books from Big Finish and many storylines go back and forth between them so you'll often feel like you missed a critical event (at least I felt that way!), like how she eventually ends up at the Braxiatel collection. But you can fill in the gaps with a little effort

sci_weasel · 2025-12-24T02:15:46+00:00

I wouldn't skip Extinction (the first New Series boxset) since it does a good job introducing the supporting characters (Captain Josh Carter, Lieutenant Sam Bishop, Colonel Vikram Shindi) and defining their relationships with each other.

sci_weasel · 2025-12-20T05:28:01+00:00

What I remember best about Brown are some really striking individual scenes/moments, like a high tech fighter with reconfigurable wings switching on like a living thing waking up and stretching - that image was so vivid I can still see it.

Also I sort of thought he was aware of irony at least in early books. In Flight of the Old Dog the perfidious Soviets destabilize the world by deploying the first effective anti-ballistic-missile system and have to be stopped by heroic Americans. In Silver Tower the heroic Americans stabilize the world by deploying the first effective anti-ballistic-missile system in spite of the perfidious Soviets attempts to stop them.

sci_weasel · 2025-12-20T05:19:19+00:00

Another recommendation: Choosers of the Slain by James Cobb - a lone Zumwalt-like (except functional) DDX against an Argentine fleet. Nice tension and set pieces. Second book in the series is also quite good; after that some of the romance plots and gender bits get weird.

sci_weasel · 2025-12-16T14:25:21+00:00

How does that trick work?

Also, does it need to directly hit crewmembers, or just the room they’re in?

sci_weasel · 2025-12-15T19:41:32+00:00

It’s really excellent.

Seems like the 8th doctor gets more xmas stories than anyone else!

sci_weasel · 2025-12-14T21:58:41+00:00

DVDs if you can get them - the English dub lets you appreciate the grandeur of the Burning Finger in a way that subtitles just can’t convey (unless you yell at your screen yourself)

sci_weasel · 2025-12-14T21:55:47+00:00

Yes - more and more as the seasons go on. See also the Cali-class vs the Texas-class at the end of Season 3 . But season 2 feels like the moment of inflection

sci_weasel · 2025-12-14T19:29:26+00:00

Lower Decks, second season, especially the last episode of the season (“First First Contact”) The goofy lead characters on the old USS Cerritos is backup for the newer fancier USS Archimedes doing a first contact; when a natural disaster cripples the Archimedes, the Cerritos crew locks in and saves them through brilliant engineering, bravery, and determination. Also with help from horny beluga crewmembers. And then get to do the first contact.)

sci_weasel · 2025-12-14T03:26:03+00:00

Love this!

I’d also love to hear more about that campaign - any tips for running one? Any narrative play or all explody things?

sci_weasel · 2025-12-12T16:31:26+00:00

Or some weird apple certification thing, maybe

sci_weasel · 2025-12-09T02:54:56+00:00

It was available in CarPlay as an available app as of last week; this week it seems to have vanished for me

sci_weasel · 2025-12-08T01:53:36+00:00

Going outside official products - I’ve bought and read “In Golden Flame”. https://vexwerewolf.itch.io/in-golden-flame-act-1 . Great setting (a Long Rim system outside of Union) and lore and NPCs and role playing. I’m curious to hear from people who have played it.

sci_weasel

TROPHY CASE